My aunt sent me some old family photos and we have a fair bit of albums here already.

I would like to get all of them sorted on my computer. I'm planning on scanning them (from a Windows machine) and if possible employing a digital camera to snap pictures of some of ones in already in albums. Then transfer the scanned ones to the FreeBSD machine via network and usb for resizing (I'll probably use gimp for this) and sorting along with the photographed ones.

The Problem:

How to organize them all !!!!

I essentially want to store each picture under a defined root directory (e.g. ~/Pictures/Albums or some thing to that effect). Along with some meta data about each photo (and possibly 'folder' or groups) where available, much like writing notes on the back of a photograph or a note in an album.

Normally I'd do this with mkdir, mv, and abusing the file system to contain information about the pictures.

Does anyone know of a program that I could use to handle this in a more elegant manner? Preferably without me having to write my own file system & SQL backed Qt frontend to organize, view, and store the photos with metadata lol.

The KDE suite of applications includes something called Digikam which is described as "...an easy to use and powerful digital photo management application, that makes importing, organizing and manipulating digital photos a 'snap'".

You need not install it (and the horde of KDE dependencies it would require) to find out if it would meet your needs; the documentation is in a separate digikam-doc package that you can install and use separately.

I have thousands of images and I use Showimg to organize/view them. I've tried just about every piece of photo management software in the FreeBSD ports tree and none can compare.

I tend to organize images with directories much like I organize my music. Showimg has support for categories and image annotation, but I don't have time to write details for every image I have. Other image databases are similar in that you have to spend a lot of time sorting images manually. I think it's easier to look at the thumbnails an put them in reasonably named directories. Categories actually wouldn't be much different or any harder, but I if you decide to change image viewers, all that work you did categorizing your photos is basically lost.

I don't really know what the future of Showimg is right now. It's been quite a while since a new version has come out and I'm not sure if a KDE4 port is in the works.

I found KPhotoAlbum's interface to be a little clunky and unsuited for my purposes. IIRC it requires all images to be under one root directory and I didn't care for that since I keep some images on a separate USB harddrive.

I've tried Digikam too and it wouldn't even start. It's database structure can't cope with the massive amount of images I have.

Most of the other apps I've tried were simply horrible in that they were either very clunky, lackluster, or extremely slow creating/displaying thumbnails. After using ThumbsPlus for years on Windows...I've got to say that open source image organization software is sorely lacking.

There are separate graphics/digikam and graphics/digikam-doc ports, must be a good chunk of docs 0.o

I checked out the projects website and it looks like a good program, if a bit of a 'big' one but hey if it works :\. I can live with the libgphoto depend's (which says it supports my camera coincidentally, hmm) and I don't mind it being KDE based.

Showimg looks like an interesting program for this and a possible replacement for xv as well, hows is it on resource usage BSDKaffee?

I did look at KPhotoAlbum after visiting the DigiKam site. Looks like a program I would like for this task but I'm not sure if the UI is one I'd want to use continually over the years.

When it comes to the libs/de's I'm not overly partial to using one over the other as long as the app doesn't pull in most of an entire desktop environment or break one in the process. I just don't want to have to break down to having to write some thing manageable through Perl+Qt3+SQL on top of all of my other projects atm.

We're talking about maybe ~8 or more albums worth of pictures if every thing (eventually) gets sorted. Possibly over a dozen between grandparents, parents, and personal ones... All of which are likely to need resizing and tagging, so effective use of time is a must!

I have a small for-fun project involving the test machine later, if it doesn't blow up I might be able to give a test install to digicam and showimg over the weekend without mucking with my laptops software.

Showimg looks like an interesting program for this and a possible replacement for xv as well, hows is it on resource usage BSDKaffee?

It's pretty good. Idling, it doesn't consume CPU and it uses about 50MB of RAM on my system. I'm not really sure how to benchmark it, but thumbnail creation time depends on the files size of the image. I had it regenerate thumbnails for about 200 JPEGs averaging about 110KB and it took about 28 seconds. Once the thumbnails were created, it took about 3 seconds to reload them.